Do you believe in free will?
Do you believe in free will?
There is an argument that free will doesn't exist because there is an unbroken chain of causality we are riding on that dates back to the beginning of time. Meaning that every time you fart, scratch your nose, blink, or make lifechanging decisions there is a pre existing reason. These reasons might be anything from the sensory enviornment you were in the past minute, the hormone levels in your bloodstream at the time, hormones you were exposed to as a baby, or how you were parented growing up. No thought you have is really original and is more like a domino affect of neurons firing off in reaction to what you have experienced. What are your thoughts on this?
Nope, I don't.
Doesn't really matter, though. We certainly have the illusion of free will, we behave as if it exists, so it doesn't actually matter in a practical sense.
It is fun to think about!
In my opinion humans are biological machines reacting to stimulus based on previous experience.
If we could theoretically perfectly map the brain and understand it, we could predict what a person would do in response to a specific stimulus.
At least that is how I have come to understand my existence.
Doesn't mean I am off the hook for my poor decisions either. I still have to make the decision, even if theoretically we already knew what I would do.
There's no evidence for free will. Every physical process involved in the function of our bodies and brains has so far proven to be deterministic in every way we can verify. That doesn't mean you can't have an original thought though, it just means that any original thought you have was necessarily going to happen and couldn't possibly have happened any other way. It's fate.
Even if the universe is nondeterministic like quantum physics suggests you still don't have free will because your thoughts and feelings are still ruled by physical processes even when they are random.
But you don't need physics to dispute free will. Schopenhauer already said that you may do what you want. But you cannot will what you want. Einstein used that realisation to not take everything too seriously even when people act infuriating.
In a deterministic reality, where all things are due and subject to causation, there can be no free will. If we did not live in a causal reality, we'd never be able to make accurate predictions or models.
"Randomness" is not free will either. If you're not in complete control of your influences, then you can not be said to have free will. Randomness does nothing to help the argument for free will.
With that said. Regardless of the existence of free will, what does exists is your awareness of what it's like to be you. To be in the circumstances that currently govern your life. And in that awareness exists the boundless capacity for compassion. Once you understand that no one is in control of their lives, that all things are causal, it allows you to be less judgmental.
"If a man is crossing a river and an empty boat collides with his own skiff, he will not become angry. He will simply guide his boat around it.
But if he sees a person in the boat, he will shout at the other to steer clear. If the shout is not heard, and the boats collide, he will curse the other person.
Yet, if the boat were empty, he would not be angry."
— Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi)
I wrote a simple explanation of determinism in a blog post earlier this year (there's an audio version available as well.) https://mrfunkedude.wordpress.com/2024/12/03/following-the-strings/
It's dangerous to tell people that they have no free will.
Those who do not want to think critically will just convince themselves that the world is falling apart and that they can't do anything about it because it's all predetermined any way.
Others take advantage of the idea of a predetermined future as a license to do whatever they please. Any terrible thing they do is not a problem to them because their actions were already predetermined, they couldn't help it because they were destined to do these things .... at least that is what they tell everyone.
I believe there is a middle ground ... our biology, our environment, our genetics and the universe as a whole runs like a mechanical clock with predetermined movements .... but we are provided with enough options at every movement or critical point to determine our future.
We will never be able to change how our universe works but we can choose how we can exist in that universe.
As I hear it described, it doesn't even make logical sense. A thing is either random, or deterministic. People talk about decisions being motivated by something, but also somehow independent of all exterior things.
People will come back that that lets you off the hook for your misdeeds, but that's only the case if you believe in retribution for it's own sake. A version of incapacitation and rehabilitation could make sense against something as devoid of "free will" as a bridge or building, and deterrence only needs the target to be capable of strategy.
To answer the question a slightly different way, in light of the post text: How random the universe is will come down to fundamental physics. The simplest way of interpreting the current state of the art is that the universe is deterministic but branching.
Free will is real and it's an illusion at the same time.
Our actions are reactions. And we are very limited in our execution of will by the most basic physical boundaries. For example I cannot fly, no matter how much I will it to be so.
We have free will to control the actions of the biological apparatus which is our body, to an extent, though even those are limited by circumstances and consequences.
Overall we have limited free will, or free will "lite"
I'm a compatiblist. I don't think a deterministic universe precludes free will. Of course there are reasons for everything we do. If free will was only the freedom to make bad or random decisions, what's the point? That's a lot of free but not a lot will.
We are particles governed by physical laws, so no
I'm not sold on the whole universe being deterministic, but Robert Sapolsky has a book called Determined which has pretty much convinced me that we don't have any agency. He's a neuroscientist, and breaks down what goes in to our actions based on the immediate causes, our environment, our upbringing, our culture, and, in my opinion, doesn't really leave a place for agency to remain. I don't really understand his arguments well enough to articulate them here, but I think he's done some interviews on YouTube which I'm sure will cover the gist of it.
The way I see it, the brain is essentially a neural network that builds a model of the world through experience. It then uses this model to make predictions. Its primary function is to maintain homeostasis within the body, reacting to chemical signals like hunger, emotions, or pain. Our volition stems from the brain's effort to achieve this balance, using its world model as the foundation for action.
Free will is based on the concept of the individual, a concept bounded by a separation already as arbitrary and illusory as a nation's border. It's pragmatic to pretend these things exist in your day to day life, but they don't mean anything to the universe.
I don't think free will can be dismissed just because the framework that it runs on is deterministic.
Let's say you program a text editor. A computer runs the program, but the computer has no influence on what text the user is going to write.
I think that consciousness is a user like that. It runs on deterministic hardware but it's not necessarily deterministic due to that. It might be for other reasons, but the laws of physics isn't it, because physics doesn't prohibit free will from existing.
Consciousness is wildly complex. It's a self illusion and we really have no good idea about where decisions even come from.
If it is deterministic, it would have to involve every single atom in the universe that in one way or another have influenced the person. Wings of a butterfly and light from distant stars etc. Attempting to predict it would require a simulation of everything. That leads to other questions. If a simulation is a 1:1 replica of the real thing, which one is then real and what happens if we run it backwards, can we see what caused the big bang, etc.
So, even if this is about free will, the enquiry falls short on trying to figure out what even causes anything to happen at all.
If we are happy with accepting that the universe was caused by something before or outside the universe, then it's really easy to point in that direction and say that free will also comes from there - somewhere outside the deterministic physics.
Of course the actual universe and the laws of physics are really not separate as data and functions. The data itself contains the instructions. Any system that can contain itself that way is incomplete as proved by Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Truths do exist that can't be proven so perhaps the concept of free will is an example of such a thing, or maybe it's not. The point is that we can't rule it out, just because it exists in a deterministic system.
Personally I don't think it matters all that much. Similarly to how we can only ever experience things that exists inside of the universe,or see the light that hits our eye, we can also only ever hope to experience free will on the level of our own consciousness, even if we acknowledge that it is influenced by all kinds of other things from all levels from atoms to the big bang.
I think we have free agency within various external constraints. Which means we can try to find ways to circumvent external constraints, while also understanding that, as the fictional Ian Malcolm Smith put it, just because we can do a thing doesn't mean we should do it.
I think the question is ill defined. The answer is entirely dependent on the definitions you use and i don't think answering the question really leads to a meaningfully different view of the world or has any real intellectual consequences.
If free will was truly non-existent, it would mean that a theoretical entity with access to perfect information would be able to perfectly predict your actions. I don't believe that is possible; I think that human beings are too irrational. Consider a very simple decision: what am I going to have for dinner? You could know the restaurants I have access to, what food is in my home, what I have discussed in a given day, and even what my current mood is, but it can ultimately come down to a whim. I could choose something I've never had before, for no reason, and seek it out.
I believe that we are individual actors in a very complex system that introduces lots of constraints to our decision-making process. We may not even be consciously aware of some of the constraints; however, we are always the ones ultimately making the decisions. You always have the option of a whim.
It is an impossible concept invented by humans. Free from what? Literally everything you do is because of things beyond your control. It isn't predestined, it just isn't up to you. The question is, at the end of the day, were you kind?
Of course given physics and materialism, sans metaphysics, free will is s myth. But the calculations are so difficult you may as well believe.
You’re describing the free will vs predestination debate we had often in theology discussion. Ours never went anywhere, so I won’t be much help. I just wanted to put a name on it for you. Might help in your search.
If there is an unbroken chain of causality, that means that history has been written start to finish already, and my consciousness is just along for the ride. The thing is, my consciousness is locked to right now, which is a single point in this 4-D space, as are all the consciousnesses that I interact with because that’s exactly what right now is.
Until the day I interact with a consciousness that is experiencing a different point in 4-D space other than right now, it does not matter if free will truly exists because from my perspective and from all of my scientific testing so far (like deciding to pick my nose as I just did), evidence suggests that my consciousness is capable of making decisions. Even if those decisions are all a result of a deterministic path, my consciousness felt like it made them so it might as well have.
Does that even mater? Either stance can't be proved.
To add to this, I've noticed not only here but anywhere I ask this question there is a camp of people who immediately become defensive and say the question is pointless. In person it can lead to people getting very angry sometimes at the idea and that is odd to me. I don't really see how the question is pointless, and instead it seems to me like some people feel intimidated by it
Just based on my observations of my life, I seem to have the ability to choose to do or not do things, and that's good enough for me. Is my choice just part of the infinite universe's fixed progression through time and I would have done what I did regardless? Are there infinite parallel universes where parallel versions of me exist that have collectively made every choice I can possibly make? Don't care. I feel like I have free will and IMO that's what's most relevant to my life in this universe.
Tl;Dr, yes*
I find this discussion to be an exercise in frustration. There's a lot of philosophical jargon that gets glazed over and nuances that often get ignored. I also think it's an incredibly complex and complicated topic that we simply do not have enough information available to us to determine in a scientific manner.
For instance: what kind of "free will" are we talking about? Often it's "Libertarian Free Will," that is, absolute agency uninfluenced by any external factors. This much is disproven scientifically, as our brains run countless "subconscious" calculations in response to our environment to hasten decision making and is absolutely influenced by a myriad of factors, regardless of if you're conciously aware of it or not.
However, I think that the above only "disproves" all notions of free will if you divorce your "subconscious" from the rest of your being. Which is where the complication and nuance comes in. What is the "self?" What part of you can you point to as being the "real you?"
From a Christian perspective, you might say the "self" is your soul, which is not yet proven by science, and thus the above has no bearing on, as it cannot take the soul into account. But from the opposite side of the spectrum, from a Buddhist perspective, there is no eternal, unchanging, independently existing "self." And as such, the mind in its entirety, concious awarness or not, is just another part of your aggregates, and from that perspective it can be argued that a decision is no less your own just because it was not made in your conscious awareness.
With my ramblings aside, I am a Buddhist and so my opinion is that we do have free will, we're just not always consciously aware of every decision we make. And while we cannot always directly control every decision we make, we can influence and "train" our autopilot reactions to make better decisions.
What explanation do people envision, after which they would both understand the mechanism of free will and are convinced it exists? That understanding just seems contradictory to me, so either it doesn't exist or we can't define it.
it all depends on how you define a person. Most likely, you think that a person's consciousness is something inside the brain, and in this case, the "external" body really influences your decisions. But that's not how it really works. The body is also a part of you, so everything that happens inside it, including "the hormone levels", is a part of you. And your experience is a part of you too. It's just that you can't control it, but that doesn't mean it's not your decisions. Otherwise, we will come to the conclusion that muscle memory is also not a part of you, but some kind of external factor. In general, if you are interested in my answer: yes, we always make decisions on our own.
well atoms themselves are inherently random you can't even perceive them without them blowing the fuck away
Yes. I could talk about quantum indeterminacy as a scientific argument for it, but fundamentally, I believe in it because I want to[1]. I don't like the idea of being a deterministic machine with a fate I can't influence with active choices. It's not provable either way with the current state of science, so I choose to believe my preferred option is the correct one.
[1] Of course such a statement presumes free will. I think I want to, anyway.
honestly, i've never seen or heard a single coherent definition of what we even mean by 'free will'. until the question makes sense, i can't really answer it, and don't see any point in discussing it.
anyways, who here believes in blabblesnork? that is a word that refers to something, i promise, but no, i won't tell you what it means.
No. We make choices, we think, but those choices come frome somewhere. And all of the roots are beyond our control. There is no room for free will, it is a magical reduction of why we do things. We don't say a ball has free will when it is kicked down a hill. I can't separate myself from the ball in any meaningful way.
Fun thought exercise but functionally irrelevant. It still feels like I'm making decisions, so that's close enough.
There is only one choice: feeling or rationality.
When you feel, you do what feels best.
When you think, you do what is the most valuable.
So no free will but that choice.
The circumstances that led you to any particular decision are pre-determined at the time you're making that decision, simply through the fact that those circumstances have already happened prior to the current decision at hand; but that doesn't mean you don't have the free will to make that decision in the moment.
To extend on that a little: if you were able to make the same person face the same decision multiple times under identical circumstances, I don't believe you'd get identical results every time. It may not be an even distribution between the possible choices; but it wouldn't be a consistent answer either. The Human element introduces too much chaos for that kind of uniformity.
Get in the car and go until the scenery looks different. Be somewhere you don't belong and you'll feel more in charge of your choices and decisions. Every single person has the ability to be a wild card and go off script if they choose it. That's free will. Embrace the wild.
If it looks like free will and quacks like free will, then it probably is free will.
You have free will, but you also have chains that bound you.
Starting from the social order, you need money and other social relations (friends, family, bosses) to literally survive in the modern world - you're not omnipotent.
Then you have the cognitive chains - stuff you know and understand, as well stuff you can invent (or reinvent) from your current knowledge - you are not omnipresent.
Then, as a consequence, without these two, you cannot be (omni)benevolent - you'll always fuck something up (and even if you didn't, most actions positive towards something will have a negative impact towards something else).
All these are pretty much categorically impossible to exist - you're not some god-damn deity.
But does this mean free will doesn't exist?
Hardly. It's just not as ultimate a power or virtue as some may put it. Flies or pigs also have free will - they're free to roll in mud or lick a turd - except for when they're not because they do it to survive (cool themselves or eat respectively).
We humans similarily eat and shit, and we go to work so we have something to eat and someplace to shit. Otherwise you die without the former or get fined without the latter.
So that's what free will is - the ability of an organism to guide what it's doing, how, when (and, to some extent, even why) it's doing it, according to its senses and sensibilities. It's the process with which we put our own, unique spin on the things in our lives.
Being an omnipotent, omnipresent and (omni)benevolent would in fact remove the essence of what free will (with all its limits) is, because our actions wouldn't have any meaningful consequences. It'd all just be an effective (what I'll call negative) chaos - a mishmush of everything only understandable to the diety.
So in fact, the essence of "free" will is that it's free within some bounds - some we've set ourselves, some we're forced with (disabilities, cognitive abilities, physical limits, etc.). Percisely in the alternative scenario would "free" will cease to be free - because someone already knows it all - past, present future, local and global, from each atom on up. There's perfect causality - as perfect as a movie. You can't change it meaningfully - any changes become a remix or remaster - they lose their originality.
With the limits on our thinking which cause us to be less-than-perfect, they cause a kind of positive chaos, one where one tries to do their best with what they have on their disposal - as they say, you get to know people best at their lowest. Similarily, everyone gets corrupted at a high enough power level - some just do it sooner than others. So surely, at an infinite power level, not even someone omnipotent, omnipresent and (omni)benevolent all at once would be able to curb this flaw.
Every decision you make and everything that happens is based on conditions, and nothing exists outside of conditions.
In the ultimate sense there's no such thing as free will, because everything has a conditioned existence.
I believe that we should treat most people as if they have free will but I don't exactly believe in the idealistic notion of free will. I believe we can make choices, but I believe our choices are limited and shaped by our experiences.
Yes but I need to define free will, I define it as the freedom to make a choice. We don't control who our parents are, we don't control what country we live in, we don't control how others interact with us but we can control what choices we make.
We can chose option A-B-C.....
I think there may be a paradox hiding in your question. You cannot believe in free will. You have it or you don't - I would postulate you need a neutral third-party observer to tell you. For us humans, a Martian might do. Believing is an act of faith. Faith tends to bend will to its dogmas. I would go so far as to say belief is the natural enemy of a free will.
We are distracted animals. All things being equal, the Martian observer will after years of careful study come to the conclusion that humans have free will. But it's constantly battered by short attention spans, a tendency to go with the herd, presupposituons in our heads that we don't often or never question, etc. We are a smartphone full of bloatware running on too little RAM. It takes skill to operate. Some are more skillful than others.
You could of course counter that by saying that's what you believe. It's paradoxes all the way down.
no. events and our decisions are abstracted far enough so that the illusion of free will is apparent. I think it's very well impossible to fully distinguish between free will and fate from our limited perspective
There’s a documentary about having free will to create your own fate and determine your own future. It’s called Terminator 2 Judgment Day.
Anyway, the whole thing goes: The future's not set. There's no fate but what we make for ourselves.
I believe we do not truly have agency but have evolved to think and act as though we do. Since inputs to each choice are likely infinite (probably uncountable as opposed to countable), the lack of agency is difficult to observe.
It's not even wrong.
I agree that there is no free will, but to act as if that is true is pointless. Nihilism isn’t useful. If it makes you feel better, you are doing what you would have done regardless even if there was free will. I don’t think the fact every action is predetermined matters much. If anything, it makes me have compassion for the worst people, who arguably were fated to be what they are because of the domino effect.
I often wonder if the dominos will ever fall in a way that guarantees us all a positive outcome. Can we heal our monsters? So that every domino thereafter creates no more?
¯_(ツ)_/¯
Poetically, you are the universe trying to understand itself.
Yes.
I observe free will directly. Watch: I will choose of my own free will to type a tilde at the end of this sentence instead of a period~ Behold free will.
Everything that says we don't have free will depends on indirect observations that blatantly make faulty assumptions. Do our senses accurately tell us about the state of the universe, and ourselves within it? Are our interpretations of this infallible?
Most egregious is the assumption that classical mechanics governs the mind, when we know that at a deep level, classical mechanics governs nothing. Quantum mechanics is the best guess we have at the moment about how objects work at a fundamental level. Many will say neurons are too big for the quantum level. But everything is at the quantum level. We just don't typically observe the effects because most things are too big to see quantum effects from the outside. But we don't only look at the brain from the outside.
Nor can we say that the brain is the seat of consciousness. Who can say what the nature of reality is? Does space even exist at a fundamental level? What does it mean for consciousness to be in a particular place? What's to say it can only affect and be affected by certain things in certain locations? Especially when we can't pinpoint what those things are?
So yeah I believe in free will. It's direct observation vs. blatantly faulty reasoning.
Local causality doesn't imply unbroken universal causality. In fact, the idea everything is a purely deterministic projection of some initial state is far weirder than the idea that stochastic actions can influence a partially deterministic state.
Yes. Every person has to believe in it to accept the notion of good and evil.
I want to, but Determinism sounds pretty reasonable. Everything is just going with the flow from the big bang, including what happens in our consciousness. Do I think this because of my own will, or because of events set into motion billions of years ago? 🤔
I believe free will exists but the world is deterministic. In your life you can make any choice you want & it was decided by you. However the effect of your actions on the world is so small that it will continue on a predetermined path. Events in the future are “predetermined” & all I have power over is how I react to it.
I absolutely believe in free will.
Maybe not 100% because I am the sum of my experiences but I can choose to act against my impulses if I want to.
It's free will as long as you don't know and/or control all of that chain of causality.
You gave an argument against free will based on Determinism, but there are other good and even better arguments IMO. Like the science-centrist arguments of Neuroscience , Psychological and the Evolutionary Arguments. Then there are the philosophical Arguments from Divine Predestination or Fate. There are still more but the fun is on the discovery.
You have as much free will as a leaf or a fish.
We have free will, but the majority are not free to exercise it because of material conditions and/or circumstance.
Thoughts and muscle movements come about through the opening and closing of ion channels that allow information to travel through neurons and for muscle fibers to contract and relax. 'Free will' in the sense that our mind is separate from our body and that it can somehow open those ion channels is a combination of dualism and molecular telekinesis, so I do not believe that, no.
But I do believe that consciousness is an essential emergent property of our brain. What we experience might be the output of a causal prediction engine in our brain that is making a prediction about the immediate sensory experience in a way that we can respond to stimuli before they happen. In that sense, yes, I do believe in free will because that conscious output that I experience is me! This prediction machine is me making predictions and choices.
I think that a materialist framing of free will requires accepting some model of consciousness in which consciousness is not just a weird accident but is a physical phenomenon that is part of us. An essential feature of how our brain works. This is not yet demonstrated (very difficult if not impossible to do so), but I think it is. Then 'free will' and 'a material system following the laws of physics' is no longer a contradiction.
OK let's just start with the assertion that there of a casual link back to the beginning of time.
We will begin with the big one first. We don't even know if time had a beginning.
If we assume that time began at the instant of the big bang. There is no plausible link between my bean induced fart, and some random energy fluctuation, there are just too many chaotic interactions between then and now.
There are so many things we don't know, making the extremely bold claim that free will doesn't exist, is dangerously naive.
We can't even solve Navier-Stokes; neuronal interaction is so far beyond what we are currently capable of, it's ridiculous.
My recommendation to anyone contemplating this question. Assume free will exists; if you are wrong, it will made no difference; you were destined to believe that anyway.
I don’t believe one can make decisions outside of their web of being.
No I don't.
"Free will" usually refers to the belief that your decisions cannot be reduced to the laws of physics (e.g. people who say "do you really think your thoughts are just a bunch of chemical reactions in the brain???"), either because they can't be reduced at all or that they operate according to their own independent logic. I see no reason to believe that and no evidence for it.
Some people try to bring up randomness but even if the universe is random that doesn't get you to free will. Imagine if the state forced you to accept a job for life they choose when you turn 18, and they pick it with a random number generator. Is that free will? Of course not. Randomness is not relevant to free will. I think the confusion comes from the fact that we have two parallel debates of "free will vs determinism" and "randomness vs determinism" and people think they're related, but in reality the term "determinism" means something different in both contexts.
In the "free will vs determinism" debate we are talking about nomological determinism, which is the idea that reality is reducible to the laws of physics and nothing more. Even if those laws may be random, it would still be incompatible with the philosophical notion of "free will" because it would still be ultimately the probabilistic mathematical laws that govern the chemical reactions in your brain that cause you to make decisions.
In the "randomness vs determinism" debate we are instead talking about absolute determinism, sometimes also called Laplacian determinism, which is the idea that if you fully know the initial state of the universe you could predict the future with absolute certainty.
These are two separate discussions and shouldn't be confused with one another.